Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Peter did send two officers to Kronstadt—unaware that the commandant had already received orders from the new empress to seal the fortress off—but did not immediately make plans to go

  there. While waiting for his Holsteiners, he supped in the garden with his mistress and the other women, toasting his future successes, letting himself be lulled into inactivity by wine and false hopes. He put aside the nagging realization that none of his messengers had come back from Petersburg, and that Vorontzov, Trubetskoy and Shuvalov were also overdue in returning.

  When the Holstein guards arrived he ordered them here and there, moving them around on the chessboard of Oranienbaum as he had once moved his toy soldiers in his palace chamber. The task absorbed him, crowding out the doubts that tugged at the corners of his mind. He had never actually commanded troops in a battle, despite his boastful claims to the contrary. If Catherine led a force against him, would he have the courage to face them? And what if the guardsmen from Petersburg defied his summons?

  Sometime after ten o'clock, bleary-eyed and too tired to resist any longer, Peter allowed himself to be persuaded to go to Kron-stadt. Something in him must have known, by this time, that reinforcements from Petersburg were never going to arrive, and that his power had been snatched from his hands by his clever wife. But he could not admit it to himself. Instead he drank, and bullied the courtiers, insisting that he would not board the galley for Kronstadt until a large supply of liquor had been put on board, along with all his kitchen equipment. It took at least an hour for the servants to load the emperor's bottles and casks, pots and pans, and entire entourage of fifty people into the galley, with the excess baggage crammed onto a small yacht. Finally, just before midnight, the boats set sail.

  The chilly voyage was unpleasant, and Peter relieved it by continuing to sip his brandy, his brain a muddled tangle of puzzlement, apprehension and dread. He had no one to turn to for comfort but his mistress, who was no doubt ashen-faced with worry and fatigue. When at one in the morning the lights of the fortress came into view, and the pilot of the galley reported that the harbor chains were closed, preventing their entry, Peter must have felt his dread increase. Still, the shreds of his vainglory remained.

  He got into a rowboat and had himself rowed toward the fortress.

  "Loose these chains at once! It is I, the emperor!" Peter commanded when he came within hailing distance of the watchman. Ordering a lantern held close, he opened his coat to display a decoration blazing on his chest, proof that he was who he said he was.

  The response made his blood turn to ice.

  "There is no emperor—only an empress."

  As the rowboat retreated, trumpets and drums sounded in the fortress, summoning the men to arms. Their shouts reached Peter's ears: "Vivat Catherine! Vivat Catherine! Vivat!"

  All was not lost. Once aboard the galley, Peter still had a chance. He could attempt to evade the fleet and sail to safety in a western port, even though armed vessels stood in his way. Should he reach a provincial fortress, he might find that some troops were still loyal to him. With their backing, he might yet regain the throne.

  Peter heard the clamoring voices around him, yet did not hear them. He could no longer think, let alone act. He was numbed by wine, by the cold, by the shock of having been dispossessed. Ordering the pilot to sail back to Oranienbaum, he retreated into the depths of his cabin and went to sleep in his mistress's plump lap.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, JUNE 29, PETER SURRENDERED to Alexis Orlov and his hussars at Oranienbaum. Shortly afterward he signed a hastily composed document of abdication, gave up his sword and, utterly forlorn, took off his beloved uniform and handed it to his captors.

  He was no longer Emperor of All the Russias. He was merely Peter, consort of Empress Catherine, a helpless prisoner at the mercy of his longsuffering wife, who had every imaginable reason to wreak a terrible vengeance on him.

  Peter wrote Catherine a pathetic letter, admitting that he had treated her badly and begging her to forgive him; all he asked, he said, was to be allowed to leave Russia and take refuge in Holstein along with his mistress and a military escort. Panin, who watched the sad spectacle of the ex-emperor's disgrace, was utterly mortified when Peter grasped his hand and tried to kiss it, begging for mercy. Elizabeth Vorontzov, in terror of the new empress, fell to her knees and implored Panin not to separate her from her dishonored lord. But the empress's orders were explicit: Elizabeth Vorontzov was to be sent home to her father, while Peter was to be escorted, under heavy guard, to his estate at Ropsha, and kept there under the close supervision of Alexis Orlov while more permanent quarters were made ready for him at Schliisselburg— where the hapless Ivan VI still languished.

  Though no opposition to the transfer of power had yet manifested itself neither Catherine nor her advisers could be certain that Peter would not become the object of a countercoup; spineless as he was, he remained a dangerous liability, a potential focus for discontent. And given the unsettled state of Petersburg, it was as well to have the former emperor far away and kept out of sight.

  For days following the thrilling events of June 28 the capital was in a state of excited confusion. Work and commerce were interrupted, drunkenness and brawling increased to such an extent that all the taverns had to be closed by imperial order. Noisy parades of soldiers, pealing bells, shouting throngs of wine-soaked revelers made such a constant din that ordinary life was impossible. Yet the joy was mingled with apprehension. Though armed troops were posted on every street and in every square, neither the populace nor the soldiers felt safe. There were periodic rumors of Prussian perfidy, and anyone seen wearing a Prussian uniform had to run for his life. The Ismailovsky barracks exploded into bedlam late one night, the men agitated to a frenzy by a wild story that a Prussian army, thirty thousand strong, was on its way to dethrone Catherine. Only after the empress herself appeared at the barracks to calm the men's fears did the fracas die down.

  Then on July 6 came word from Ropsha that Peter was dead, the victim of a sudden violent quarrel with one of his guards, Prince Feodor Baryatinsky. It was a chilling beginning to Catherine's reign, and one that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  According to Alexis Orlov, who sent Catherine a letter from Ropsha, the "misfortune" was sudden and unavoidable. A quarrel erupted, blows were exchanged, "we could not separate them, and already he was no more." More likely the truth is much darker; Orlov or his subordinates strangled Peter, secure in the knowledge that they were doing the empress a favor.

  When or by whom the suggestion was made to murder the former emperor will never be known with certainty. Catherine certainly benefited from the crime, which was carried out in the presence of her key ally Alexis Orlov and a number of others. To impute Peter's death to Orlov's overzealousness would be to ignore both the toughness of Catherine's resolve and her political astuteness, as well as her capacity for encompassing the unthinkable. She had just taken over a kingdom; she was neither too tenderhearted nor too ethical to shrink from doing what had to be done, however distasteful, in order to safeguard her precarious authority. Yet she may not have given a direct order to kill her husband, or even hinted that his demise would be welcome to her. Still, her critics took note that she punished no one for the crime.

  When word of the villainy reached her Catherine took it in stride, though on the following day she gave way to tears and sobbed on Princess Dashkov's shoulder. Two things concerned her above all: the popular reaction to Peter's death, and the reaction of her trusted adviser Panin, who, she feared, might be so appalled at the wickedness of the crime that he might want to disassociate himself from her government. Panin had after all preferred to see Peter replaced by a regency, not by Catherine as empress. He might see in Peter's death not only a crime but a colossal miscalculation—proof that Catherine was not fit to govern.

  For a tense few hours Catherine, Panin and one or two others met to discuss the crisis. No record of what was said
at that meeting has ever come to light, but it must have been a crucial test of Catherine's leadership. According to the French ambassador Berenger, Catherine summoned all her persuasiveness to convince Panin that she had not been complicit in her husband's murder. In the end he proved cooperative, and helped to draft the official announcement of Peter's death.

  According to this announcement, the former emperor had died of colic—from which he had, in fact, been suffering during his captivity—following a severe attack of hemorrhoids. The Russian people were instructed to regard the tragedy as "evidence of God's divine intent," a sign from heaven that Catherine was meant to reign. They were also summoned to view the body, which was to lie in state at the Nevsky monastery.

  Thousands of people made the journey to witness the lifeless remains of Emperor Peter III —and many among them drew back in horror at the sight. For the face of the corpse, imperfectly disguised by a large military hat, was a ghastly purplish-black and a voluminous cravat covered the entire throat—carefully arranged, people murmured, to conceal the bruises made by the murderer's hands. It was rumored that Peter had been poisoned and then strangled.

  A disturbing wave of feeling against the new regime gathered force and swept outward from the capital. In the provinces, where Peter had never been the hated ogre that he was to the citizens of Petersburg, the late emperor was sincerely mourned. Some provincial soldiers denounced the Petersburg guards regiments for taking power into their own hands and using it to create a new empress. Many denounced Catherine—sometimes openly, more often in whispers—for compounding the iniquity of usurpation with the evil of regicide.

  The manner of the late emperor's burial also led to mutters of dissatisfaction. Catherine had denied her husband burial in the honored resting place of the Russian rulers, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul. Instead he was immured in the Nevsky monastery, isolated from his ancestors, as if in a sort of eternal disgrace. To be sure, Peter was unlike his predecessors in that he had never been crowned, and so lacked the spark of divinity lent by the sacrament. Still, the unconventional burial seemed to confirm the general suspicion that the manner of his death had been both ignoble and deplorable. And Catherine, who did not even attend the funeral, ostensibly dissuaded from doing so by the Senate for reasons of health, was clearly to blame.

  The reaction of Catherine's subjects in Russia was disturbing enough, but that of the journalists and newsmongers in Western Europe was upsetting in the extreme. Almost without exception they denounced the empress as the barbarous ruler of a barbarous realm, where cruelty and murder were the hallmarks of power and where the light of reason and humane government had yet to penetrate. To Catherine, who saw herself as a beacon of enlightenment in a swamp of vulgarity, ignorance and dissipation, such aspersions were distasteful in the extreme. To be compared to Ivan the Terrible, or to the English Queen Isabella, who had ordered the murder of her husband Edward II, was deeply vexing, particularly when she saw herself in the mold of Peter the Great, and the English Queen Elizabeth, sovereigns who were masters of their own and their realm's destinies.

  Few observers, in Russia or outside it, believed that Catherine's government would last long. A young woman ruling alone, lacking the protection and authority of a husband and largely without experience in rulership, would surely be devoured by a palace revolution, or a governmental crisis, or a revolt of the guards. The English ambassador Lord Buckingham referred to Russia as "one great mass of combustibles with incendiaries placed in every corner," and the other representatives of foreign courts agreed with him, all the more so when the Semenovsky guards revolted in August.

  The volatile guardsmen, always combustible, were ignited by some ember of discontent—a rumor, a brawl, an insult, a challenge—which set off a small conflagration. At midnight their drummers beat the call to arms, all the men scrambled for their weapons and rushed out into the barracks courtyard, shouting and calling out to one another. Weapons were discharged, blows flew. Entire neighborhoods were aroused to panic, and people thought that another revolt was under way. With great difficulty the officers managed to corral their men and quell their turbulence, but not before the police, the authorities and Catherine herself had become alarmed.

  On the following night the same thing happened again: the midnight summons to arms, the pell-mell rush into the courtyard, the noise, the panic. This time some officers joined the men in unleashing chaos, and the remaining officers were all but helpless in extinguishing the tumult.

  Catherine moved swiftly to respond. Many officers and soldiers were arrested and whisked off to unknown destinations where they were detained indefinitely. But the threat of a guards' revolt did not dissipate; everyone knew that, having put Catherine where she was, the guardsmen could supplant or overthrow her with equal ease.

  Even if Catherine's fledgling government succeeded in controlling the explosive guardsmen, it could hardly hope to surmount the huge obstacles of debt, disorganization and administrative chaos that were the legacy of Elizabeth's reign. These alone, observers believed, would combine to overwhelm the new ruler and her advisers, who would then be vulnerable to another palace revolution.

  Catherine's government faced disaster. The fiscal crisis was of enormous proportions, and demanded an immediate and drastic solution. The treasury was utterly depleted, debts were running into many millions of rubles and mounting fast, and, because Russia's credit had become worthless in foreign markets, no further loans could be raised. The severe shortage of money produced another predicament: army pay was in arrears, and the government relied on the army, not only to protect itself and the realm against attack, but to keep order, collect taxes, and suppress revolts.

  Calamities of many sorts were descending on the new regime. Crops failed, bringing famine and leaving many peasants unable to pay their taxes; some fled from their masters, or rebeled, and as local government had all but broken down, the rebellions flared unchecked. On the Ukrainian borderlands, Turks and Tatars made frequent forays into Russian territory, carrying off peasants and enslaving them. Bandits terrorized the roads, pirates raided traffic on the Volga. Added to these were natural disasters and the vagaries of a harsh climate, which left some regions devastated by floods and others prey to fierce storms or prolonged droughts.

  To deal with this array of catastrophes the empress relied on the Senate, a handful of underpaid, unreliable provincial governors, and an antiquated bureaucracy far too small in numbers to control the huge expanse of Russia. No one knew better than she did how difficult was the task that faced her. As she herself wrote, recalling the early weeks of her reign, "The Senate remained lethargic, deaf to the affairs of state. The seats of legislation had reached a degree of corruption and disintegration that made them scarcely recognizable."

  And there was another obstacle to surmount. Well aware that her hold on power was precarious, Catherine had to constantly woo the senators and senior civil servants, to earn their loyalty. She knew that while no one wanted to undertake the hard labor of governing, everyone in the government wanted to feel important. So she spent long hours with elderly officials who offered her uninformed advice, made longwinded requests and proposed impractical plans. Every court day brought a fresh group of importunate petitioners and would-be counselors, who tried her patience and took up her time with their demands and their rambling conversation. She did her best to convince each one that she took his needs or proposals seriously, she acknowledged each suggestion as best she could, and when she could not follow a particular piece of advice, she made an effort to explain why.

  All this effort left her drained. She confided to the French ambassador that she felt like a hare being hounded by hunters, forced to dart this way and that, running in a dozen directions, ever alert to danger.

  Still, she rose to the challenge. Within days of Catherine's accession it was clear to every secretary, clerk and minister that a new pair of hands held the reins of power. Where Elizabeth had been indolent and averse to business, and Pet
er had been an empty martinet, Catherine was industrious, pragmatic, attentive to detail and full of common sense. She and Panin had clear ideas about the direction in which they wished to guide the empire and how to guide it there.

  Early each morning the empress was at her desk, reading reports and dispatches, answering petitions, deciding on appointments. She wrote to each provincial governor and regional military commander ordering him to send her regular written summaries of conditions within his jurisdiction, and she addressed herself to drafting orders, or ukases, on everything from the conditions of road transport to disputed fishing rights to the consecration of religious shrines.

  To protect her subjects against exploitation by grain speculators she ordered that an imperial granary be established in each town, so that she could regulate the price herself. Perhaps remembering the wretched lunatics whom Elizabeth had kept at court for her amusement, Catherine instructed the College of Foreign Affairs to gather information from European countries on how the insane were treated there, so that the best available western models could be instituted in Russia.

  Determined to reinvigorate the premier governing body, the lethargic Senate, Catherine restored to it powers removed by her husband, principally the right to legislate and to review petitions. She divided it into departments, with each department responsible for a different facet of governance, and added more clerks and secretaries to improve efficiency. Instead of emasculating the Senate, as Peter had done, Catherine intended to rely on it to oversee routine tasks, so that she and Panin would not be overburdened with time-consuming mundane labors and could concentrate on the more difficult and longer range issues facing the empire. At the same time, however, Catherine made it clear that she meant to stay firmly in charge; instead of the brief summary reports the senators usually sent to the sovereign, she demanded detailed reports, leaving nothing out. She might delegate, but she would remain watchful.